Lambo's Latest Rambo Has a Heart

ROME—This being a Latin country, we begin in media res: Somewhere between Turn Soratti and Turn Roma on the Autodromo Vallelunga, a charming little racetrack/killing field where Lamborghini has chosen to stage the media premiere of its new $400,000, V12-powered, all-wheel-drive supercar, the Aventador LP700-4. Cordite, lakes of fire, tower flybys, the sound of cats being shoveled into a furnace. You get the idea.

It's a lovely day. At the moment I'm making a slight left-hand turn over a low brow of asphalt in 3rd gear, well in excess of 100 mph, with the afterburners on. Dis car, she's a prestissimo, all right. With the pushrod, inboard suspension, body roll is beyond minimal. I'm tightly belted into the recumbent driver's seat, but the escalating lateral g-forces are sloshing my organs around like squid in a cooler.

Photos: Another Lamborghini Supercar

Lamborghini Aventador LP 700-4 Lamborghini

The wick is turned up, which is to say, the car's dynamics system is set to "Corsa," or "Race" (the more relaxed driving modes are "Strada" and "Sport"). In Corsa mode, the car's slew of computers permit significant rear slip angle; direct most of the 509 pound-feet of torque to the rear wheels through the Haldex center diff; quicken the steering and the shift-response of the seven-speed automated manual. The Aventador can accelerate from a dead stop to 186 mph in 24 seconds so, you know, respect.

And yet, nothing overly dramatic here, no I-see-Vishnu moment. The Aventador is settled, sorted, safe, predictable, progressive…. I'm sorry. I was told there would be Lamborghinis.

As the animated-graphics tach needle sweeps toward the 8,500-rpm redline and it sounds like something tender is well and truly caught in the wringer, I grab for 4th gear. POW! SCHMMANNG!! I am rewarded with a hateful shove in the back, an upshift that takes, according to the company, 50 milliseconds—in case you're curious what explosive decom- pression into the vacuum of space feels like.

But, alas, Romeo, I'm now coming up on the next corner all wrong and my chosen trajectory will put me somewhere near fair Verona. My pupils dilate so fast they cramp. As I gently, carefully back the car down, amid the crackling static of exhaust overrun, the most remarkable thing happens: It doesn't spin.

The Aventador story is really about the way it doesn't spin.

ENLARGE

The cockpit-like interior has an LCD instrument panel.
Lamborghini

What is an Aventador? Well, first you must understand Lamborghini's product strategy. The bank is in the company's collection of mid-engine, all-wheel-drive, V10-powered berlinettas and spyders, the Gallardo line. It's widely expected that the company will also soon offer a four-seater, perhaps a latter-day Espada, and/or a four-door.

But the company's halo cars are its nutty, narcissistic, testosterone-addled V12-powered starships. To name them since the 1970s: Countach, Diablo and Murcielago. The car the Aventador replaces, the Murcielago, set the modern standard for dysfunctional supercar love: ferocious, belt-high, chthonic, a car so pagan you should use a reindeer cape as a car cover.

The Murcielago also was/is, to put it mildly, a handful in the handling department. Actually, the Yakuza are more forgiving. In the very situation I'm in at Vallelunga—a transient cornering maneuver with some speed, having to peddle the throttle to bring the nose into line—the Murcielago would be all wound up, its out-of-date stability software and AWD system agonizing between understeer and oversteer. Blame the car's longevity (with some bones going back all the way to the Diablo), the steel chassis, the bureaucratic layering of software.

The Murce's battle-hammer handling is well known, and it really did tend to erode the brand with aficionados. Owning one was like being married to a stunning, six-foot model with a lobotomy. People were torn between envy and pity.

ENLARGE

Lamborghini Aventador LP 700-4
Lamborghini

Like the Murce, the Aventador is named after a famous retired fighting bull, continuing Lambo's tradition of naming cars after animals that wind up as dog food. The "LP" part stands for Longitudinale Posteriore—the engine is situated longways behind the seats—and the "700" stands for metric horsepower, if you can believe it.

Like the rest of the car, the 6.5-liter, naturally aspirated, dry-sump lubricated, 48-valve V12 is absolutely brand new and it is in-sane. Free-revving, frictionless, tractable at low speed and as torquey as the Grand Coulee Dam, this is just about the perfect V12. Interestingly, Lambo did not deploy direct-injection cylinder heads— a specialty of parent company Audi—but a DI engine is inevitable. According to the R&D chief Maurizio Reggiani, the various control modules for this engine process a half-billion calculations per second.

The engine is also extremely compact, weighing a mere 518 pounds. The crank center is fully 3 inches lower than the Murce's, and the car's center of gravity feels like it's somewhere near the Shire in Middle-earth. Zero-to-60 mph happens in under 2.8 seconds; 0-124 mph in under 9 seconds. The shoes on our cars are specially built Pirelli P-Zero Corsas (225/35-19's in front, 335/30-20's in the rear), and the car weighs 3,472 pounds, dry, or an easy 3,600 pounds with all fluids onboard. We'll get back to that.

Lambo had two top-line goals for the Aventador. The first was to build a supercar with exceptional handling. The second was to underscore the brand's Italianness. As to the second, mission accomplished. Not since the Roman Legion has anything Italian killed so indiscriminately. The Aventador design, an in-house effort at Lamborghini, is outrageous, an exuberant parley of rays and hexagons low enough to slip under the door (the windshield rake is the flattest of any production car, I'm told). The word that comes to mind is exothermic, the first nanoseconds of an explosion splintering into white-hot fractal fissures. For a company that prizes extremity above all, I think they got this about right. No, it's not the Countach, but then nothing ever is.

To be clear, the Aventador is ferocious and to toss one around the track feels like getting pummeled in a gravimetric mosh pit. The thing has incredible lateral grip and wonderful mechanical balance, and if you manage to get it wrong the ghosts in the machine—the AWD, the stability system, the 15-inch carbon ceramic land anchors—are there to bail you out. And it took the Boeing Corporation to help Lambo build a carbon-fiber chassis (150% stiffer than the Murcielago) weighing a mere 324 pounds. The car is fully 6.1 inches longer than the Murce (wheelbase is up by 1.4 inches) and yet the car weighs 200 pounds less, with all the kinetic advantages that implies.

Still, mass is mass, and when you chunk these 3,600 pounds into a corner, you can definitely feel it. The Aventador is too big, and too wide, to be in any sense tossable or flickable. Yes, the limits are extreme. But you drive this thing with teeth gritted like Snoopy's Red Baron. Also, the Pirelli Corsa tires are fantastically sticky until they start to melt under the car's load and weight—which takes about 20 laps around Vallelunga. Buy tires in bulk.

So, while I'm mightily impressed, according to the seat of these pants, the McLaren MP4-12C is still currently the best-handling supercar in the world. Pity about the looks.

And to the extent that the Aventador is drivable, comfortable and predictable, some might actually feel a little nostalgic for the old car. Driving the awesome Murce hard was kind of like getting mauled by a Westminster-winning standard poodle. It hurt like hell but it was, you know, kind of an honor.

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